So by trying to co-opt the populist rage (thereby normalizing Trump’s rhetoric with the help of an all too obedient media), Trudeau has just opened the door for a blowhard like Kevin O’Leary to stride through: Kevin O’Leary to enter Conservative leadership race today. Quick! Let’s attack his character! Let’s call all his supporters idiots and racists! Let’s remind everyone how he tanked on Celebrity Jeopardy! I mean, seriously. What could possibly go wrong?

Of course, if this jackass does get elected employing the same shady methods as Trump, it will be a perfect storm of undeserved hype, unprepared and acquiescent progressives, and a terrible electoral system. Michael Rozworski puts it more eloquently:

I hope Canada’s broad left learns the lesson from Trump’s ascent: focus on the issues not the scandals or “character”. Yes, O’Leary is stupider than a cardboard cutout of the Monopoly man. He’s odious too. But the main reason he’s bad is because his politics push to the right on every major issue while engaging a “common sense” of lost hope in the public sector and the public sphere.

His politics would be a corporate bonanza that entrenches inequality and leaves most people worse off. The way to fight it is a simple politics that benefits the majority at the cost of the few: a $15 minimum wage, expanding healthcare, creating national child care, a green jobs program and building housing. It’s not rocket science but it’ll require a huge change from the focus grouped timidity we have now.

“We go out and work very hard to raise money and make those connections,” he told reporters on Monday. “I do find it a bit rich when they’ve just both spent about a billion dollars to win the presidency in the United States.”

Those who live in an entire nation of glass so systemically embedded in every corner of society shouldn’t throw stones, and by throwing stones in this case we mean do their job, one of which is to point out how everything is made of glass.

We were apparently supposed to celebrate the windfall that foreign capital flows had on our markets. Again, this was a policy direction aimed at funding the retirements of Boomers at the expense of the future of Millennials, or as one B.C. MLA told me, this windfall can be used by Boomer parents to help out their kids. Many will and some won’t, but what this MLA was unwittingly endorsing was the move away from meritocracy and toward the creation of a landed gentry: if your parents were lucky enough to win the property lottery, you can hope for a piece of it.